It's challenge time and bean-earning time! -stomps feet and bangs on desk-

First of all, it's the first week of classes and I hope you all are very much enjoying yourselves and raking in those points!

To start off the school year, we are going to be hosting a challenge! Within this challenge, we are hoping that you all will help us in renaming the sections of the Gryffindor Paw Print. If you are unfamiliar with what the Paw Print is, it is Gryffindor’s very own amazingly awesome house newspaper. We decided to clean out the cobwebs and give it a nice makeover to celebrate the new school year.

Here are the various sections within the newspaper. I will give you a breakdown of what could possibly be published in each section to try and give you a better idea of what it’s about. Most of these should be fairly self-explanatory:

- News – This section will be for articles about various happenings around HOL and the different common rooms. We’ll post about art challenges, library challenges, challenges from other houses, and other various articles of interest.
- Sports – QUIDDITCH! Quidditch and any other articles revolving around the elusive world of physical activity and games.
- Gossip/Entertainment – Movie reviews, book reviews, culinary-related articles, horoscopes, different participatory games (i.e crosswords, Sudoku),
- Editorials – Self-explanatory, but these will be individual articles for those wanting to write opinion pieces. Not necessarily serious opinions, but it can apply to both serious and ridiculous.
- Advertisements/Classifieds – Obviously, the section of advertisements and classified.

Submission Guidelines

This challenge starts right now!

We’re going to be opening this challenge at two separate times. Gryffindor students may start submitting their entries from this moment on.

Starting on September 8th at 12PM HOL, this challenge will be open to all other houses and they may submit their entries to us at that time.

You are limited to 3 submissions per section. Based on the number of sections, that means you can have up to 15 total entries.

The contest will close on September 11th at 12PM HOL. All entries must be submitted by then.

Please make sure you are following all HOL Rules and Guidelines and all individual House Rules and Guidelines if applicable. Any inappropriate submissions will not count and you shall face my wrath.

How To Submit

- Make sure when you’re submitting you indicate which section your title submission is going to. Such as, if you’re submitting that title name to the news section, make sure we know it’s for the news section, otherwise there will be mass chaos and confusion.
Example: (Witty Title Name) – NEWS
(Amazing Title Name) – GOSSIP/ENTERTAINMENT

- Please do not turn in your submissions individually. You may submit your three section entries in one message or all fifteen entries at the same time, but not 1 entry per message. Be kind to us.

After all entries have been submitted, the Gryffindor Staff will go through and select the best ones. Those selected entries will then go into a Gryffindor Common Room Poll where the staff and students of Gryffindor will vote for the winners!

Rewards/Awards

The winning submission for each section will win 10 beans. There will only be one winner as we can only have one section title name.

Each section submitted for will earn 5 beans

So, you have a chance to win up to 75 beans for just submitting all your entries, let alone winning. That's a lot of beans, people.

I believe that's everything! We so very much look forward to reading your submissions. If you have any questions or need clarification on any details, please feel free to reach out to either myself or Professor Matz.

Since the poll is for Gryff's only we'd like to take this opportunity to mention the section of 'Honorable Mentions' that we found, that while still amazing, just didn't beat out the initial voting process. Once all voting is done, we will also let everyone in HOL know here, which one's made it to the finals and of course, which one's won. Here are the honorable mentions:

Also, like last year the paper will be open to all houses to submit to. We will have some already created articles that we'd like people to write (in house articles for Gryff's, everything else pretty much up for grabs) as well as accepting submissions. So if you haven't signed up for our forum, you may want to if you want to contribute. We will of course take other article submissions, as long as we agree to the theme, etc, before they are written. All pre-decided topics are first come first serve, but we always check the Gryff forum first. When we're ready to post the first issues info, we will notify you all. We ask that you not PM or email us at this time, as we haven't decided quite what where will go where and we have to re-establish a dual email account. As soon as we've got these results in, and those things in place, be ready to join in. We're looking to publish our first paper by around October 20th.

We have had a bit of delay for releasing the results of the contest only because we have two ties with the polling. We're issuing another poll for those two ties with a 24 hour limit to vote. So, Gryffindors, once again if you'll head over to the GCR and vote on your favorites!

Beans will be awarded tomorrow evening after the polls close and we have the finalists.